A cross‐sectional study of disfluency characteristics in children’s spontaneous speech

Since both the erroneous and the well-formed, norm-following utterances are produced by the same rules of production, the analysis of disharmonic phenomena and self-repairs can help the researcher to look into the hidden operation of speech planning processes, also in the stages of language acquisition. The aim of the present study is to analyze age-specific patterns of children’s disfluencies and repair strategies. Occurrences of various types of disfluencies, the repair ratio and the duration of editing phases were examined in spontaneous speech samples of seventy monolingual Hungarian-speaking children aged between 6 and 13. Results seem to confirm that the ratio of self-repairs depends on the children’s age and the type of disfluency. Findings of our cross-sectional analysis shed light on the changes of speech fluency which may be associated with the developing language usage